Put this poll in your pipe and smoke it

Conservative bloggers have been peeing in their pants lately with delight over polls that show great public dissatisfaction with the Democratic-controlled Congress.

They ignore, of course, the fact that the low numbers for Congress reflect, in part, great dismay that lawmakers aren't taking a harder stance against the Bush administration. The right-wingers want us to think that the polls reflect an anti-liberal bent among the public, which is nonsense.

And the conservatives have got nothing to say about a Pew poll showing that Americans favor the Democratic Party over the Republicans by a margin of 15 percentage points. Karl Rove's dreams of a permanent Republican majority are gone with the wind, as this piece notes.

Saturday morning! Time for cartoons!

Let's go over to Uncle Bob Geiger's place and check out the weekly collection of political cartoons. (Actually, Bob's not home, but Jack Ohman's there. So, be nice, OK?)

Did we deserve the attacks of 9/11?

Every time I turn around these days, I hear some moralist suggest, in effect, that perhaps America deserved to be attacked on Sept. 11 because our culture is so rotten.

They seem to be saying that we should bow to the reforms the radical Islamists prescribe for us and the rest of the world.

Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, wrote today in the Wall Street Journal: "We make it too easy for those who want to hate us to hate us. We make ourselves look bad in our media, which helps future jihadists think that they must, by hating us, be good."

The Rev. Canon Andrew White, vicar of an Anglican Church in Baghdad, was quoted recently in the Christian Post as having said that Middle Easterners are repulsed by what they perceive as tolerance of homosexuality by Americans in general, even Christian Americans.

Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report quotes Glenn Beck, a right-wing rattlepate on CNN, as recently saying:

More and more Muslims now hate us all across the world, and it really has not a lot to do with anything other than our morals. The things that they were saying about us were true. Our morals are just out the window. We’re a society on the verge of moral collapse. And our promiscuity is off the charts. Now I don’t think that we should fly airplanes into buildings or behead people because of it, but that’s the prevailing feeling of Muslims in the Middle East. And you know what? They’re right.

Another darling of the political right, Dinesh D'Souza, wrote a whole book about how the terrorists of Sept. 11 were provoked by our libertine culture. His title summed up his sentiments quite neatly: "The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11."

Of course, we all remember when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson got together on TV just two days after the attacks and blamed them on American decadence. God was angry, they said. That's what the terrorists thought, too. Jerry and Pat and the murderers were in agreement.

It wasn't so long ago that certain right-wingers were fond of saying that liberals were too quick to "blame America first." My, how times have changed.

Why do the media bother with crap like this?

If you thought last weekend's Iowa Straw Poll on the race for the Republican presidential nomination was meaningless (and it was), what do you make of the Illinois Straw Poll?

What? You didn't know that any such poll had been scheduled in Illinois? Well, hardly anybody else did either. It was conducted during Republican Day festivities Thursday at the State Fair in Springfield. About 1,000 people cast ballots, and Mitt Romney led the pack with 40 percent of the vote.

There's nothing wrong, of course, with GOP fairgoers having fun with their little poll. It is wrong, however, for the media to report on the matter, as CNN and others have done. Such coverage conveys the message to the gullible that the results of this poll actually are significant, which they're not.

What's worse is that State Republican Chairman Andy McKenna (pictured above) is such a dunderhead that he publicly characterized the outcome of this silly exercise as exciting evidence that Romney "has begun to put together a strong statewide organization."

No wonder the Illinois Republican Party is a basket case.

Frederick of Hollywood speaks

Now we know why Don Manzullo has endorsed the yet-to-be-announced presidential candidacy of Fred Thompson.

It's because the guy is so articulate. Consider, for example, his response to a question today on just when he might actually get in the race:

We are going to be getting in if we get in, and of course, we are in the testing the waters phase. We’re going to be making a statement shortly that will cure all of that. But yeah, we’ll be in traditionally when people get in this race.

Admit it. The man's eloquence puts Barack Obama to shame. And Fred's an actor, too, you know.

Straight skinny on Iowa straw poll

Karl Rove, the agnostic

Bill Moyers delivers an apt farewell to Karl Rove here, and The Rascal resurrects an item offered here three months ago about Rove lacking any religious faith (which, by the way, doesn't necessarily make him a bad guy).

Just 19 cents each (plus shipping & handling)

I hope this sort of thing isn't commonplace among military contractors.

Most folks skeptical of Petraeus report

Americans have been fed so many lies about the war in Iraq by the Bush administration that most of them suspect that next month's report on the success, or lack of it, of the recent surge will just be more of the same.

A CNN poll on the matter also shows that about half the public thinks the surge has not gone well , and 72 percent say the report from Gen. David Petraeus will not change their opinion of the war.

Bush aides have admitted that the report will be written not by Petraeus but by White House officials.

Who killed Pat Tillman? And why?

The Bush White House refuses to release its documents relating to the death of Pat Tillman, the pro football star who was killed by "friendly fire" in Afghanistan in 2004.

Questions remain about what really happened to Tillman, a critic of the war in Iraq, but the Bush administration won't reveal what it knows, or what it knew, or when it knew it.

Congress is putting bipartisan pressure on Bush concerning this matter, and heat is emanating from other quarters as well. Check it out here and here and here.

George Orwell would be proud

More than two years ago, Dick Cheney told America that the insurgency in Iraq was in its "last throes."

The gullible among us drank that Kool-Aid and stood behind the Bush administration's war policy, only to see it sink us deeper into a quagmire.

Accordingly, most folks aren't buying such rosy scenarios anymore, but the hawks are still out there peddling them.

This guy, for example, has an Orwellian pitch. He wants us to believe that signs of setback actually are signs of progress. Losing should be seen as winning. Down is up. Bad is good. The worst bloodbath of the war is proof that the bad guys are on their way out.

Sure it is.

Football! Football! Football!

The Chicago Bears played their first pre-season game this past weekend, and I caught bits of it on radio and television.

The accounts I heard on both media reminded me of the odd penchant among people associated with the gridiron culture to use the word "football" seemingly six times in every sentence.

I've been complaining about this for years now, and a search of the Internet shows that I'm not the only person annoyed by it. But the problem persists. Broadcasters, coaches, players and others involved in the sport have to remind themselves every few seconds that the game is called "football." Consequently, any reference to a player becomes "football player"; a team is a "football team"; a field is a "football field"; and so on.

When this odd compulsion is combined with the overall pointlessness of what some of these jock types have to say, you sometimes get utterances like the one Mike Ditka delivered a few years ago in reference to a certain athlete: "This guy is a football player. He comes to play football ‘cause that's what he is, a football player."

This habit of overusing the term "football" is no doubt involuntary. It likely arises from some subconscious sense that frequent use of the word conveys an especially keen grasp of the sport's traditions and true meaning; it separates the men from the boys, the insiders from the outsiders.

This strange phenomenon is equally common at the professional and college levels; it's even infected the prep world. In the pro game, however, it has a curious comcomitant: You don't often hear broadcasters, coaches or players refer to "the NFL" in their unscripted patter. No, no, no. The initials won't suffice. It has to be "the National Football League." I mean, how weird is that?

Baseball has no parallel to this nonsense. Baseball people can discuss their sport at length without using the word more than once, if at all. I like to think that's because baseball people are more intelligent, which is why the game has inspired more good literature and poetry than has football.

(Yeah, yeah, I know. I used the word "baseball" three times in that preceding paragraph, but only for sake of comparison. Listen to a radio account of a baseball game sometime, and three or four innings can pass without any mention of the sport's name.)

How can there still be people who think it's patriotic to support this stuff?

This is amazing.

They're playing these political games with the lives of young Americans on the line.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, all the pseudo-patriotic right-wing bloggers and the other dimwits who think the surge in Iraq is working well might want to check this. It's about U.S. military officers offering a bleak picture of Iraq's future.

Ronald Reagan's toys

Ronald Reagan was fond of saying that government is the problem, not the solution.

Libertarians and free-marketers all across the fruited plain would nod in agreement at the Great Communicator's wisdom.

Today, lax regulation by government has led to the frightening spectacle of unsafe products all over the American marketplace. Witness this week's recall of millions of dangerous toys.

Gregory Flannery sums up the situation correctly.

The truth about Rudy and 9/11

You'd look frightened, too, if the Village Voice did a long piece about five big lies you've been telling.

Christian and Islamic fundamentalists are equally nutty on the issue of human origins

A new study based on public surveys in the United States, Japan and 32 European countries shows that only the Turks rank lower than Americans in public acceptance of evolution.

The story on the Fox News Web site (yeah, really, Fox News) explains the sorry situation thusly:

Among the factors contributing to America's low score are poor understanding of biology, especially genetics, the politicization of science and the literal interpretation of the Bible by a small but vocal group of American Christians, the researchers say.

"American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalists, which is why Turkey and we are so close," said study co-author Jon Miller of Michigan State University.

I wonder if your typical American Christian creationist knows of his or her philosophical kinship on this matter with your typical raging Islamist toting an AK-47.

Overrated Rizzuto dies at 89

Phil Rizzuto, one of the most overrated players in the history of baseball, died today in a New Jersey nursing home at the age of 89.

Rizzuto played shortstop for the New York Yankees in the 1940s and '50s, a period in which the team won seven world championships. But how this guy ever was elected to the Hall of Fame is beyond me.

Check that. The reason is obvious: He made it to the Hall because he was a darling of the New York media machine. There can be no other explanation.

Rizutto's statistics over 13 seasons were underwhelming, to put it kindly. He had a lifetime batting average of only .273, hit only 38 home runs and was mediocre at best in the field. Oh, yeah, he was a good bunter. Big deal.

Compared to Ron Santo, who played third base for the Chicago Cubs -- and who's not in the Hall of Fame -- Rizzuto couldn't carry his jock. Santo had almost 10 times as many home runs, more than twice as many RBIs, a slightly higher lifetime batting average and won five gold gloves in the field.

Even one of Rizzuto's claims to fame as a broadcaster after he retired as a player is phonus balonus. He's widely credited with coining the exclamation "Holy Cow!" in describing exciting plays. But Harry Caray (who, by the way, was vastly overrated in his own way and was no favorite of mine) was using the term long before Rizzuto became a broadcaster.

Maybe Rizzuto was a nice guy. I don't know. But he certainly doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame. There are dozens and dozens of far more deserving players who have not been celebrated in Cooperstown.

Indeed, the Hall -- which is tainted by extremely faulty selection procedures and is tied to a fictitious version of baseball history -- deserves to be ignored altogether in favor of some other form of enshrinement of the game's best players.

And don't get me started on Dizzy Dean, another grossly overrated Hall of Famer. The guy won only 150 games, for Chrissakes!

Global warming skeptics think the tables finally have been turned, but have they?

NASA has announced that some of its temperature data for previous years were skewed a bit because of a computer glitch.

Global warming skeptics have seized upon the issue as proof that the alarmism over climate change is greatly exaggerated, if not entirely discredited.

Here's perhaps the best single source for arguments on both sides of the matter. There are more than 130 comments on this piece, and some of them are quite arcane. But the reading is worth the effort.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum has something to say on this subject. So do his commenters.

Now Chris Matthews has gone too far

I dissed Chris Matthews here last week, and with good reason, but now I've got even more reason to wish that he'd go away.

The guy is a blatant sexist, and his offenses are no less egregious than those for which Don Imus got canned by MSNBC, the company that still employs Matthews.

The parent company of MSNBC also owns CNBC, where Erin Burnett works. She's the woman whom Matthews disrespected last Friday night with his inappropriate remarks about her looks.

Matthews has a long record of sexist remarks, and he'd better soon reform or he's going to come under the same kind of unrelenting fire that chased Imus off the airwaves.

Incidentally, Digby's worthy take on this latest of Matthews' offenses is right here.

An idea the GOP might want to emulate?

Gee, let's hope some of our more loony Republicans don't hear about this.